Tuesday

You've got to hand it to Steve Jobs - he believes in everything that Apple makes and he knows, exactly, what he wants his company to be. He designs in a closed way - his rules, his products. He doesn't crowdsource his ideas or his campaigns and I highly doubt that he listening to conversations in the space to try and guess what people want from him.

He knows. And he's passionate.

Yesterday, on a quarterly call with investors, he went on a 5 minute rant about why Apple is the OS of choice vs. Android. I've got to say that I love the passion here and that he makes a ton of great points. While I still believe that their is validity in the 'open vs. closed' argument, you cannot argue for a second that Apple makes products that just work. No trouble. No problems.

Here is the rant:

Passion. Conviction. Vision. Would you defend what you to this extent?

Sunday

Over the last few months, I've been exploring a number of content curation services. Many are in the early Alpha stages and it's been tough to get access but one that I've been really impressed with so far is Storify.

As anyone in digital knows, the amount of content that is being created on a daily basis is immense. Billions of bits of content created on a daily basis which makes the amount of information to sift through impossible. In a way, our stories are now made out of disparate bits of information - Tweets, Videos, Flickr shots, Status Updates, etc - and the only way we consolidate them is when we tie them together in our minds as we view them (or someone creates a list for us and posts it on Digg).

Storify is hoping to change all that. Created by a former AP editor, the site allows users to create stories by pulling related-content together into one stream. Think of the stories as large articles with the different content bits actually embedded within them. For the iPad users out there, it's sort of like creating your own flipboard channel.

I've been using the service for a few days and have been pretty empressed. It's easier to pull the content together than a blog post would be and more comprehensive than simply linking to a post or video that you like.

I've created a Storify link that I've embedded in this post about Bill O'Reilly on the View. It took about 5 minutes to create and, to be an extreme nerd, was pretty fun. Here it is:

What do you think? Do you think you could get used to curating and consuming content in the way that Storify provides it?